Shamanic Roles and Perspectives

17th century Saami shaman's drumhead showing cosmology

Despite the seemingly universal nature of shamanism, different cultures and individuals have elaborated distinctive forms of shamanic practice. Hunter-gatherers in Asia and North America, for example, call on spirit powers that are generally animals. Shamans in these societies must negotiate with them for good luck in hunting and to maintain the health of the group. Shamans in pastoral herding societies, such as the Mongols of Central Asia, tend to rely on ancestor spirits, both male and female. They call on them for healing and to ensure the fertility of humans and domesticated animals.

Shamanism as a practice, however, has rarely become a formal social institution. Almost everywhere, shamanism was in the past and still is today a set of local activities and perspectives, rather than an ethnic or national institution. Thus, it is best to think in terms of shamanic activities and perspectives rather than about “shamanism” as an ideology or institution. Five fundamental features define shamanic perspectives or worldviews.

Shamanic practitioners share the conviction that all entities— animate or otherwise—are imbued with a holistic life force, vital energy, consciousness, soul, spirit, or some other ethereal or immaterial substance that transcends the laws of classical physics. Each member of this wondrous cosmos is a participant in the life energy that holds the world together. The Polynesian mana, Lakota wakanda, and Chinese Taoist ch’i are conceived of as powerful forces that permeate everything.

Shamans believe in a “web of life” in which all things are interdependent and interconnected; there is a cause-and-effect relationship between different dimensions, forces, and entities of the cosmos. In order to heal, Inuit shamans may imaginatively assume the form of a bird that brings celestial messages.

Shamans organize this complex reality by saying that the world is constructed of a series of levels connected by a central axis in the form of a world tree or mountain. Many Siberian tribes speak of three, seven, or nine sky worlds above the earth upon which humans live, all resting on a disc supported by a giant fish. The Buryats of southern Siberia portray a heaven with ninety-nine provinces, each of which consists of physical landscapes that mirror an earthly landscape, with the roof of each one being the floor of the next one. Shamans travel to these worlds moving up or down through these cosmic levels and sometimes sideways into alternative worlds upon the earth.